New to the forums, going on 3 years full timing in truck camper with GF and dog.

[Fivealive]

Greetings!  I am very happy to have found this forum.  I am a 35 year old aspiring landscape photographer, I gave up on the grind and started chasing my dreams of wanderlust, adventure, and creative expression about 3 years ago.    I travel with my girlfriend and trying to meet other people who we can relate to has been a big struggle.  I started watching some youtube channels of van dwellers and couldn't believe how much I related to all the rants everyone was going on.  A few people referenced the RTR so I looked into that and found these forums.   We love our solitude but also crave human connections from time to time. I wish I would have known about you guys when we started this!  We plan on attending the next one and are excited at the prospect of finding community.  We were hoping we would find something like that at slab city, we met some really good folks there but our stay was very short lived.  On our 2nd day a very aggressive red-zone pitbull was off leash and came up and attacked our small 15 pound dog.  The pit nearly killed our precious pup and we were devastated!  We took him to a vet in Brawley and he has recovered well from the attack, but I don't think we will be going back to the slabs.   

Anyways, we started a blog and all that, the link should be in my sig.  I apologize for the lack of recent updates, I'm hoping finding this community might help motivate us to start blogging again.  We really just had friends and family reading the thing and a lot of them don't really get us, so it felt a bit awkward trying to be authentic with it.  

Nature photography is my big passion, I have no idea how to get it to pay the bills but I am not in a huge hurry for that.  I am currently funding our travels by picking up small IT field work jobs.   Thanks to some awesome online marketplaces I have been able to land work in every city we have attempted thus far.  Even in the very poor imperial valley I managed to pick up a gig installing a new mailing machine at the state prison using one of the platforms.   Onforce.com, fieldnation.com and workmarket.com are the 3 I use.  

Deserts, forests and the coast!  These are the places we like to be.   We started out in the pop-up camper shown in the middle shot but it proved to only really be good in ideal weather conditions.  I really love to photograph bad weather so this was not really working for us. We found a nice old couple selling a 1978 hardtop for $1000 in the Olympic peninsula and we made the swap.  It's 10 years older then our pop-up was but actually in better condition overall.  Closer up pictures of our current camper can be found on my flickr.  

 

[skyl4rk]

Welcome, hope to see you at the RTR next year!

 

[Fivealive]

Thank you! I noticed my sig didn't seem to work on that last post. I guess I missed the check box.,

*Edit Ok I have no clue how to get the sig to work! Lol.

 

[Yogidog]

Welcome!

 

[akblack10]

Welcome FiveAlive, I think you found a forum with lots of knowledgeable folks always eager to help! I too have a truck camper, AKA Bertha, and I lived in her from 2011 to 2015. I have a small apt I "wintered in" since last Aug, but plan to hit the road again soon. I enjoy your photos!
-AK

 

[BradKW]

Wow, you have some really awesome photos in your album! I didn't even get past the first page...not sure if its Flickr's attempt to make people sign up, but it won't allow me to slideshow them and I have to keep using "back" button after each view, which takes me to the beginning each time...   :huh:

I hope you find a way to market them though...I'd probably impulse-buy a couple if prints were available under $30...  

 

[rvwandering]

Welcome to the CRVL forums! The RTR is a lot of fun and you will meet kindred souls. Hope to see you at the next one!
The photos that you posted are beautiful. We don't have enough data to see the rest of them but I'll look the next time we have free WiFi.

To help you learn the ins and outs of these forums, this "Tips & Tricks" post lists some helpful information to get you started. We look forward to hearing more from you.

 

[Fivealive]

Hey thanks everyone for the nice feedback. As for flickr, I have not been very active with that one lately either. For people interested in my photos I do have a site up http://bjg.photography. It has my instagram feed built into it at the bottom which is my most active feed lately. For those who use instagram, I'm @bjgphotography.

I hear ya on the limited data plans. Boost mobile recently started offering up unlimited high speed LTE data for only 55/month. It has been a life saver for us. I bought the moto e phone for only 50 bucks at best buy and it is a very compatible and hackable phone. It works well with the clockwork usb tether program without even needing to root the phone, so you can use that unlimited high speed data on your laptop. Boost uses the Sprint network which has improved dramatically in just the last year even. I still carry a pre-pay verizon jetpack assuming I'm going to be somewhere that my boost won't work and the jetpack will, but that has yet to happen.

 

[cognitive dissonance]

Welcome, Fivealive.  It must be interesting to arrive here having already figured most of this out for yourselves.

I used to sell a few images here and there through a stock agency.  Didn't make me much then, can't imagine it works even half as well today.

Look forward to meeting you at RTR!

 

[nobodyG17]

Hello and welcome.  Amazing photos on your flicker.

 

[cyndi]

Hi fivealive! Welcome to the forums.

If you're on FB there's a group of younger, mostly still working on the road fulltimers. Great group. The more you net work, the more you'll find we're everywhere.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/NuRVers/

Also, with regards to community, there's a webpage and app called RV Village, You can tell if a member is in your neighborhood at any given time
http://www.rvillage.com/

 

[Fivealive]

Those groups look awesome! I'm joining them now thank you for the heads up Cyndi!

 

[Fivealive]

I'm really hoping that NuRVer group is better then the forums make it sound at first glance. They claim to not be my grandpas RV group but the sections are laid out with topics for RVs, 5th wheelers, and Travel trailers. No mention of smaller more practical rigs, and then they have a campground section and no boondocking section! Then they have a poll on the front asking where people camp, the vast majority answered paid campgrounds and parking on the streets got a big fat 0%! Funny that they say its not your grandpas RV community because it really seems like a great community for someone who has a house to sell for a nice big rig and fat retirement check to pay for campgrounds. If I was in that situation I would be living like that for sure so no offense to those who live like that, I just find it a bit unrelatable. Perhaps I have them pegged all wrong though?

 

[BradKW]

I just wanted to say I've been slowly surfing through your album(s) and you really have some amazing stuff there. I haven't a clue what it takes to make money taking pictures, but if you don't have it, I'm not sure who does

 

[Theadyn]

Hi and Welcome!!